Thursday, November 03, 2011

Help me write a talk for next wkend, on Hannah Weiner and what I'm calling "intense autobiography." How does autobiography figure in your own writing and/or art practice? How specifically in ways that may be considered counterintuitive to or innovating upon the genre of autobiography? How, likewise, someone who you admire, or with whom you share affinities? Email me at wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com.

Your mention of making breadMakes me think of leaveningA leavening for change is a leavingIt takes time and is kneaded

And is needed this is a pre-political thing, this is a post-political thing, this is most of allA political thing, this ingestion

Through the mouth or the hearthThat surrounds the mouth makes usA domestic scene whose worth isMeasured by the public, floating

Upon the heat of the air, in this senseOf seeing or being in the danceFor a polis we can partake ofWe are down below, all, we are all

Animal down here, and this con-sumption is too large to fit coffinlikeIn the tomb our planet has becomeConviviality and nourishing substance

Must do their work that surroundsThat surrounds the mouth a resPublica so-called this breadUntil it is held in common, until

Sense levels us we are left to leavenThe leave-taking of our sensesMust be plain, made by danceSo becoming becomes a heaven

Presupposing time and justice are one.

2.

The ingestion of one substanceWe are makingThat we are makingThe world up as we are alsoMovement and we are builtTo move in waste our ways otherwiseThan being what you have to sayWhen breath becomes breadAnd there seems no other wayBut in this dance other forces sway usWe are persuaded like the world twistsThe way it depends on breadEveryday to sustainThe simplest thingsIt is the simplest things that areEasiest to forgetIf we ever remembered them at allI am using the line as a continuous breathNot a metaphor for things seenLike we can breathe our way out of this immiserationPivot and pirouette our way out of debtOut of the pollution of everythingTo assert the fourth dimensionBetrays our sympathyAnd not merely our power over, as Pound claimed,Every beingTo leaven this sense of awe againThe power of things over words, that wouldBe breadMaking the world up as we moveThese built lines of songThese step-like tonesWhen time and justice should be one.

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

"In this place—zero or nil—the dancers move low to the floor. They are grounded—literally. And it is from the floor that they will rise, and writhe, and continually fall again. As if gravity itself were complicit with the violence committed against them. As if it were also a force of resistance embodying the harm that had been done to the violated and tortured. Gravity becomes an active and visible material through Ouramdane’s choreograph[y], propelling the body/subject (back) into being."